Testing large-scale 11n performance to get easier

VeriWave to incorporate real-world traffic in testing; Cisco on board

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

One hang-up with reaching the all-wireless-enterprise nirvana we hear so much about has been an inability to affordably test 802.11n networks at scale and create a real-world proof of concept for the networks. This situation has made it hard for enterprises to feel confident that production Wi-Fi networks will actually deliver the per-user, per-application performance they require.

"No one has come up with a credible way to do large-scale wireless LAN testing yet," asserts Craig Mathias, principal at the Farpoint Group wireless consultancy, who has years of independent wireless testing under his own belt.

Review: Good options for wireless packet analysis abound

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One hang-up with reaching the all-wireless-enterprise nirvana we hear so much about has been an inability to affordably test 802.11n networks at scale and create a real-world proof of concept for the networks. This situation has made it hard for enterprises to feel confident that production Wi-Fi networks will actually deliver the per-user, per-application performance they require.

"No one has come up with a credible way to do large-scale wireless LAN testing yet," asserts Craig Mathias, principal at the Farpoint Group wireless consultancy, who has years of independent wireless testing under his own belt.

Review: Good options for wireless packet analysis abound

Enterprises are more likely to want to move ahead with 802.11n deployments after the standard is ratified next month. But how can they be sure their 802.11n nets will yield predictable, Ethernet-like performance?

Enter VeriWave, which says it has figured out a way for WLAN vendors and enterprise IT departments to verify that, on the day they turn on their 802.11n networks, they'll get the coverage and throughput needed for hundreds or thousands of users. The company's WaveAgent 2.0 lets makers of WLAN equipment and their customers validate WLAN performance claims, while identifying interoperability issues between clients and the network infrastructure and testing proprietary features, according to the company.

VeriWave makes mobile performance testing products that, like its main competitor Azimuth, have heretofore used simulated traffic only, which works well for limited deployments. Its new approach, which is being adopted by WLAN vendors such as Cisco, however, combines the simulations with real-world traffic by supplying a low-footprint (64-KB) executable that can run on laptops, smartphones, netbooks and other devices.

"Actual users are the best testers," explains Eran Karoly, VeriWave's marketing VP. "IT can temporarily install WaveAgent 2.0 [on as many Wi-Fi client devices as they want] by giving users a memory stick, sending the executable over the air or having users download it from an internal Web site. Then they can remotely activate and start running tests."

Jake Woodhams, senior manager, technical marketing at Cisco, which is building a new 240,000-square-foot lab for WLAN testing and plans to use WaveAgent 2.0, explains the challenge with large-scale testing for most enterprises.

"Each [wireless] access point is a shared medium. A single client test doesn't give an accurate view of the real world. But if you test with lots of devices, the cost, in terms of time, goes way up, because you have to check each test endpoint" and continually tweak variables, he says.

Current tools, he says, "are limited in what they can tell you. You'd have to have several thousand physical endpoints to test to real scale. To be fair, that's impossible."

For years, there has been industry talk of creating an independent Wi-Fi performance-testing lab to do just that. But determining how to fund such an operation and figuring out a test methodology that would make all vendors feel they were getting a fair shake have held things up.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.